Real life experience: I was working on a global customer service redesign project.
Someone on the upper ranks had decided to do some cost cutting and thought that it would be a great idea to consolidate all the consumer contact options in one place.
Previously, each country had their own way to deal with complains or feedback.
Typically countries offered different options for consumers to contact them if they had any issues. Usually their offered a call centre, an email address and an online feedback form.
A call centre back office representative would receive the feedback/complain from the different sources and would update a system when all this was consolidated.
They hired a consulting firm to assess the situation and the main consultant who was driving this project spend months putting together -very impressive I must admit- slides explaining what the new process would look like.
He was involving all stake holders, having weekly calls with updates sending long descriptive emails on where we were at along the way, what was needed to be completed every week and so on.
I was brought in half way through the project and was asked to review it. The idea was that consumers would contact the company only through a webpage where they would have to fill in their request/feedback/complain.
There would no longer be an option to call, email or send a letter (yes some people still do that!). I asked how many calls were previously received on a daily basis and the answer was on average 3 calls so it was deemed not worth paying for a call centre.
The web based solution was celebrated by everyone as being a great idea (cutting cost & consolidating data). So I thought I would give it a try and see how this worked. I was horrified!
Do you want to find out what happened next? Click here!